Sita's Ascent Read online

  ‘I’m not weak, Hanuman, I know what I have endured. The rakshasis hate me, perhaps the whole world despises me. I can rise above what is to come, but I’m no martyr. The real test is to come after all this, in spite of all this. It is up to you, Rama, me, all of us to rebuild a world of trust with the seeds of our belief. A world without trust will never have the strength to seek the truth. Without the quest for truth there is no love—and dear, dear Hanuman, without love this life is meaningless. That is the cycle of the birth and death of hopelessness that I want my freedom from. Ra-ma!’ She sighed. The name, the being, the man, her love—it was her life-breath.

  When the war got over, Hanuman ran swiftly to Asokavan to meet Sita. He needed to see her in person and tell her that Rama was alive and Ravana was dead. He knew about the various tricks Ravana had played on her. He might even have got one of the rakshasi attendants to misinform Sita of the turn of events after he was killed. As he reached Asokavan where she was still being held hostage, he found her sitting alone with the look of someone who had endured too much and was close to tipping over the edge of sanity. She was gazing mindlessly at a crow that was plucking a red strand of intestine; its beak was stained with blood.

  The first words Hanuman uttered had to be carefully chosen. She saw him and stood up. Her legs were giving way. At the verge of herself, she asked, ‘Is it all over? And … him?’ Hanuman quickly said, ‘Rama …’ and she began twisting and wringing the palla of the sari she had been wearing since the time she had been captured. She was very agitated and it seemed to Hanuman she was making a rope to hang herself with, thinking that it was Rama who had been slain. In the distance when the conch shells sounded, she looked again at Hanuman. Her eyes once again sparked with life when he finally spilled the good news. She cried with relief. Triumph, victory, nothing mattered. To know that Rama was alive poured the very essence of life back into her. Her voice, her limbs, everything was restored. ‘I’ll keep this sari for as long as I live; wherever I am. Its every wrinkle is inscribed with all my longing for Rama to return. Return to the Light!’ Hanuman wept too, inaudibly uttering Jai Sita Ram.

  When they were back in Ayodhya, many months later, Rama and Sita were settling into a pattern of domestic life in a city after years of roaming in the forest. Hanuman was visiting and stayed for a while. He would help Sita clear her vegetable garden and they both talked of many things, ordinary and extraordinary. It was often for an hour after lunch. One day, as Hanuman approached, he saw another woman sitting beside Sita and reading her palm. She appeared to be a mendicant with numerous little bundles tied to a forked stick. Gifted with an inner vision for reading the invisible aura of beings, Hanuman could tell this was Soorpanakka in a shape-shifted form.

  He tuned into their conversation. ‘It won’t be long now. You’ll be pregnant,’ said Soorpanakka, ‘and all the trials you suffered in captivity will be washed away.’ Sita gasped at the foresight of the stranger but was captivated by her soothsaying. The mendicant continued, ‘So, tell me, they say he held you for one whole year in captivity? Surely, you could have found a way to escape? I suppose he kept watch on you night and day. Or perhaps he watched over you himself! So, what do you now remember of Ravana?’

  ‘Nothing, really,’ replied Sita as she was thinning some sandalwood to make a paste to anoint Rama on his return home.

  ‘Really? Was there really nothing that tormented you? Whatever his faults, he must have been very remarkable!’ Soorpanakka pursued Sita.

  ‘I never looked at him,’ said Sita plainly.

  ‘But you must have heard his voice? Heard his footsteps as he walked towards your cell, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, or even recognized his perfume?’ And so, on and on Soorpanakka in the garb of a stranger persuaded Sita to confide in her. ‘Many palaces lingered with his perfume long after he had left.’

  ‘That may have been so. But I was subsumed by what had happened to me in one blinding flash that afternoon in the forest. All I had was the memory of Rama, waving to me, then rushing into the depths of the forest. What madness I sent him towards—a golden deer! What was I thinking? That was the last image I had of Rama, and it was all I clung to. Rama, night and day, day and night.’

  ‘Surely, you took in what was around you? There was a possibility during the twilight hours?’ asked Soorpanakka mischievously.

  ‘As I never looked at anything, I cannot tell you.’ Sita paused. She remembered looking beyond. ‘But just once, I remember seeing his toenail,’ she said, as if not wanting to leave her guest empty-handed in her search.

  Hanuman, watching through the trees, winced. As he moved forward, he felt something tumbling inside him. The feeling of arriving too late.

  ‘Describe it to me,’ whispered Soorpanakka. Sita began: ‘It was oval and shone like mother-of-pearl. It was like a mirror … he must have wanted to look at himself at all times.’ The woman started to draw. ‘I’ll complete this and return it to you tomorrow,’ said the mendicant Soorpanakka as she deftly rolled all her bundles into one big mop and, casting it on her shoulder, began to sway out of Sita’s vegetable garden.

  Hanuman kept watch. The next day when the stranger visited Sita, she unravelled a portrait of Ravana on cloth. Sita was taking down her exile sari that had been drying, and Soorpanakka quickly rolled the painting with a smaller section of the sari.

  When Hanuman met her the next day, Sita told him what happened. They both peered at the open scroll. It had a line drawing of Ravana standing, dressed in all his splendour. The tone was compassionate, as was the subject, in spite of his magnificent attire; he looked down at his polished toenail, almost as if to catch Sita’s eye in it. Hanuman could see Sita’s predicament. ‘I don’t know what to do. She saw me and predicted that I would be pregnant. How can I turn away a well-wisher, even if she was only a passerby, just like that, Hanuman? In giving me the good news she also wanted to make me a present, but I did not know what kind of present. I just gave her one word … a toenail.’

  ‘And we are confronted with our inner warrior to wrestle with our conscience,’ said Hanuman almost inaudibly. Then, in his inimitable way of being decisive but hesitating out of courtesy, asked: ‘Can you not destroy it?’

  ‘What if more harm comes from it? Surely, it’s not good to do that with someone’s creation? And that too of a woman’s who has spells and charms!’

  It seemed to Hanuman that Sita had been thinking of how to hide the scroll from Rama for a good part of the day. She kept it under her bed, hidden in her wooden dowry chest. That night she dreamt the painting had come to life. Ravana emerged from the scroll and stretched and yawned as if he had been in a temporary sleep and had awoken refreshed. As he stretched, he caught hold of Sita’s sari palla and started unravelling it; she was losing control. He smiled lasciviously and drew her so close she could smell his perfume, and his breath, and she began to scream. Sita awoke with a start and did not know what to say as Rama held her very close, even tightly. Rama wondered what the matter was.

  The very next day, Sita decided she must get rid of the scroll. She had made sure that the maids and cleaners left early that afternoon. It took her considerable effort to drag the dowry chest by one of its side handles; she brought it out, keeping it close to the bed. Her hands were trembling as she steadied the key into the embedded lock. She heard it click and the well-oiled lid of the chest swung open. She bent down to get the scroll that was hidden among some of the things she had collected during exile. She didn’t hear the door open, the softness of Rama’s feet on the floor as he returned unexpectedly. He was delighted that no one was around. To spend a few moments with Sita, alone, during the day was a rare privilege. He wanted to surprise her and stood still gazing at her. She stood transfixed by the skill of the artist staring back at her from the open scroll as she held it in her outstretched right hand. Rama wanted to surprise her. His arm slipped deftly round her waist and as he drew her close she felt his soft breath on the nape of her neck, until he
saw what she had been looking at. She froze and he froze. He moved aside and she turned to face him—her arm still frozen holding the portrait of Ravana. ‘You don’t understand …’ she began and stepped towards him, ‘it’s not what you think …’ when the scrap of the exile sari slipped from her other hand that she had extended in an attempt to touch him. Rama recoiled; he had never been wounded in this way before. He knew how precious that chest was to her, where she had stored all the things that deeply mattered to her during exile. Seeing the chest unlocked and Ravana’s portrait in her hand must have opened a door into the dark for him. Perhaps he did understand what she felt but couldn’t understand the situation they were in, tormented by Ravana even after his death. Yet again, there was a bridge between them that could not be crossed. She took one more step towards him and he stood, willing to listen. She could not mistake the love he held for her in his eyes and the open wound in his tears. Outside, the herald sounded the hour and in the hall of the apartment, a minister was announced for his appointment with Rama. One more interruption. All he said was, ‘After all that time, Sita, this?’ before he turned and left. There was a bridge between them, but now silence was growing thick and fast like the darkness that shrouds any glimmer of the possibility of moving forward.

  Hanuman could see it all so clearly when he went to meet Sita the next day. Her eyes had lost their lustre. Rama and Sita never indulged in domestic quarrels that could become the hub of gossip and intrigue along the palace corridors. But he sensed the storms brewing in their interior landscape. Rama was meticulous in his attention to detail at the court, while Sita carried out her duties with an inward gaze. It all looked frighteningly normal.

  Hanuman decided he would do something totally by instinct to solve the problem. Once again, he used his special power granted by his father, Vayu, the god of air. He sighed at first, then took a deep breath. He shrank to the size of an ordinary rhesus monkey. The monkey scampered on all fours and began to spoil the ripe plantains hanging from the tree. The gardeners and cleaners tried to chase the menace away, but the monkey leapt on to the veranda of the palace apartment. Scurrying into the royal bedroom, it hid under the bed of Rama and Sita and dragged out the scroll that was lying near the chest. Now there was a longer train of cleaners, maids and stewards who were following the monkey and were determined to catch it. The monkey gnashed its teeth and screeched at everyone who in turn was paralysed into a stunned silence. Then it proceeded to eat the scroll, bit by bit, and then in chunks as it was chased around in the room. With one enormous belch it swung its tail, reached an open window and leapt out of it. With screams and shouts and the train of attendants following in a long shuffle, the monkey reached the plantain grove. It sat and started growing purple. Everyone stood around in a circle seeing it groan. It vomited at the base of the tree. One of the gardeners approached with a flaming stick of wood. The monkey swivelled this way and that and lunged up on to the tree, which had now caught fire, and with a final screech through the smoke, disappeared. No one could tell what had happened to the monkey.

  The story of the vanishing monkey was the talk of the domestic staff the whole of the next week. Then the great news broke into the open—Sita, their beloved queen, was pregnant.

  Hanuman smiled to himself as he remembered the incident and jogged into a thicker part of the jungle. He came to a custard apple tree and could not resist. He stopped and picked the soft fruit. He placed one in his mouth—it was so creamy and sweet. Whatever the scale of his mission, he couldn’t stop himself from playing his game of spitting out the pips. These formed tell-tale arcs that mapped his way from Lakshmana, and through the overgrown trail that led to Valmiki’s hermitage.

  Ashwamedha

  Drums were pounding and conch shells and cymbals were resonating through the streets of Ayodhya. It was an hour before midday. The perambulation around the temple had been completed and the procession had reached the palace lotus pond. The procession had followed a golden idol of Vishnu bedecked with emeralds, rubies, pearls and sapphires seated on a palanquin carried by forty strong brahmins. The bamboo poles of the palanquin, each fifteen feet long and five inches in diameter, rested on their bare shoulders. They deemed it as a mark of the god pressing his feet into their bodies. They heaved with entranced devotion, singing the thousand and one aspects of Vishnu, who to them was the sustainer of life. Ten men each carried the left and right front poles of the palanquin with the space for a man to run between the columns, dowsing them with water in the midday heat. The same arrangement was followed for the two columns of men carrying the rear poles.

  A vibrantly embroidered umbrella was fixed above Vishnu’s head to protect him from the sun. The procession was a labour of intense love. Vishnu was parading the streets. Women having their periods and elderly men and women stood at their doorways—which were wreathed with branches of neem leaves to mark a sign of illness in the house—as Vishnu and his brahmin warriors passed by, chanting the hymns. All those who could not go to the temple where he resided were now brushed with the god’s grace. ‘You see, Vishnu loves us. If we cannot go to him, he comes to us!’ said a salt seller, her eyes beaming as though by the arrival of a long-awaited parent. The deity on the palanquin rocked on the shoulders of the men who paused by her for one moment. Everyone’s heart was brimming over with Vishnu’s visit.

  Kings from neighbouring kingdoms were on a state visit and Rama was in consultation with his ministers. The fragrance of frankincense mixed with dust and the confetti of marigold petals wafted in through the open arches of the Assembly Hall from the procession on the streets. They couldn’t help hearing the exhilarated invocation to Vishnu:

  You are the breath of being

  You are sound in space

  You are wetness of water

  You are fragrance of flowers

  The butter in milk, churned from the ocean of consciousness

  O let there be Love Eternal

  The way You are

  Sixty or more years ago, Valmiki had seen a white luminous dot in the middle of a moonless night. The pounding on the earth as he put his ear to the forest floor sang of freedom. Sixty or more years hence, Valmiki could hear it again. A low thunder that would ascend into a torrential happening. This was the Ashwamedha. The name of the ritual that every king would dare to perform if he were invited to, but dare not for the fear of failing. Like his father Dasaratha before him, Rama, counselled by his ablest ministers, agreed to release the luminous white horse from the kingdom’s stables. It would gallop without a rider, or a bridle, across the borders of kingdoms. The rulers of these kingdoms had made their alliances and were in the Assembly Hall listening to the invocations to Vishnu, in the hope of hearing that the Ashwamedha horse returned to Ayodhya’s stables without being contested. It was a foregone conclusion that Rama, like Dasaratha, would be crowned King of Kings.

  Even if there were rebellious kings, no one had dared bridle the Ashwamedha, or ride it, as that would signal a challenge to Rama’s rule. Preparations had been taking place for months. The penultimate stage had arrived. The horse rode on for three days and three nights, with Ayodhya’s messengers taking outposts at various locations to desist the horse from stalling for too long. They hid behind rocks and hills, within fields and valleys, past the bends along riverbanks, under the arches of gateways in and out of kingdoms, inside monasteries, sanctuaries, granary houses, villages. Messages were flown by courier pigeons and communicated through a code of clay whistles to chart the Ashwamedha’s journey and relayed to Ayodhya. Ministers would be given the information after the progress had been confirmed, to collate how many kingdoms had submitted to the alliance with Rama. There was a loud cheer as results declared that in none of the kingdoms represented in the Assembly Hall had the horse been stopped by any rebellious group. Each king beamed with pride as he was honoured for keeping his word and confirming the alliance to Rama’s court. The other kings nodded assent. They knew who their allies were in case sub-alliances had to be f
ormed.

  The countdown had been going on for months as the horse charted new territories. It was a night with the moon waxing into its third quarter. As the horse galloped onward, its mane flying, it seemed to light up the dark night. In the forest by Ayodhya, parrots, kingfishers, peacocks had all settled for the night. The owls kept watch, and even the daytime birds stirred in their nests as they sensed a change. A tiger stalked by a pool and a cheetah awoke on its delicately balanced perch.

  The horse came, steadily galloping by the edge of the forest, brushing its mane against the low boughs of trees, when someone leapt on its back. Lava began riding the horse, first grabbing tufts of its mane. A whistle, and Kusa jumped from a low branch and ran alongside the horse as it galloped. He heaved himself up with the sheer exhilaration of the moment and sat astride it, behind Lava. They rode with freedom and happiness, never having known such power, communion or speed. At thirteen years of age they had dared to walk through the forest in the dark as they knew the language of their wild habitat and had befriended it. They rode the horse skirting the edge of the forest until they came close to the hermitage. They slowed the horse to a canter and then to a walk.

  Valmiki had dozed off and his steady snoring whistled through the hermitage, circling it with a halo of restfulness. Sita awoke suddenly and dabbed the perspiration on her forehead with her sari. She had slept very peacefully and wondered why she had woken so abruptly. She heard Valmiki snoring, Urmilla muttering ingredients for a recipe in her sleep, then a soft thud. It was heavier than a fruit dropping at night, or the hoof of a goat. Then she heard the frenzied neigh of the horse.